Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.

Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.

I don't write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn't poetry. It's prose.

The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear.

I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.

The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know.

If you think something's happened quickly, you're looking at only a part of it.